Rowdy Miranda Lambert highlights Chicago Country Music Festival

A pink electric guitar at her hip, Miranda Lambert called out to the crowd at the Chicago Country Music Festival, "Do we have any bad girls here tonight?"

Over the course of five years and three records -- her latest, "Revolution," was released Tuesday -- Lambert has established herself both as a star and country music's bad girl -- a hard-drinking, pistol-packing, man-seeking blonde firecracker.

The 25-year-old Lambert lived up to that reputation with a rousing performance at the Petrillo Music Shell on Saturday night that made the cold and drizzle an afterthought. Though the weather made for a small crowd that didn't entirely fill the seating area, the audience danced and cheered throughout Lambert's 90-minute set.

Lambert isn't one to suffer nobly as her man does her wrong, the way country icons like Patsy Cline and Tammy Wynette once did, and she goes further than Loretta Lynn when it comes to standing up for herself. On "Sin For a Sin" and "Gunpowder and Lead," she responds murderously to cheating and beating partners, giving a female twist to the conventions of the country death song.

While Lambert is hardly as lewd as Lady Gaga, her sly attitude toward sex is a departure from country music's traditional strictures. She lamented the lack of availability of "the boys who only want one thing" on "Guilty In Here," and with a stormy rendition of The Faces' "Stay With Me," Lambert laid claim to the same right to a callous one-night-stand as Rod Stewart.

"Stay With Me" was one of several covers Lambert performed that showed her love of early-'70s rock. In a nod to the weather, she opened with a rendition of Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen The Rain?" and later performed the group's "Travelin' Band." Midway through her set, she delivered a lovely rendition of Chicago folk hero John Prine's "Angel from Montgomery," followed by a blues-guitar stomp through The Band's "Up on Cripple Creek."

Her music reflected these roots, with up to four guitars, plus a mohawked bass player, driving the songs with grinding riffs, razor-edged slide guitar licks and a stomping backbeat. If the accompaniment leaned heavily toward classic rock, Lambert's rolling and tumbling melodies stayed true to traditional country, particularly on the Southern gospel hymn-indebted "White Liar" and the swaggering honky-tonk of "Dry Town."

Lambert matched the music's fervor with forceful cries and calls in a hard, East Texas warble, and showed her tender side during her ballads. Singing gently, her voice took on a baby doll tone suggesting a sweetness and vulnerability beneath the brash exterior, particularly on the can't-go-home-again heartbreaker "The House That Built Me" and "More Like Her," which enviously describes a woman who stole her man back from Lambert by being a doormat.

If at times Lambert takes her hell-raiser persona so far in the opposite direction that she verges on caricature, she has plenty of time to figure out how to integrate her soft and strong sides. In the meantime, her performance showed how much of a good time a girl behaving badly can be.